The British government said tonight that it is to continue authenticating negative certificates on British exports to the Middle East, which confirm that the goods do not originate in Israel. A Foreign Office Minister told Parliament that the government had concluded it would be against British interests to discontinue authentication despite being urged to do so by a House of Lords Select Committee.
Israeli sources called the British decision “very disappointing,” and in marked contrast to the Dutch Parliament’s passage last week of a bill to ban compliance with the Arab boycott. The government said that it had consulted a wide range of bodies involved in Middle East trade and that it was their consensus that refusal to authenticate certificates would pose “an unacceptable risk” to British exports.
In a minor concession to the Lords Committee, however, the Foreign Office is now issuing notices stating that it is in no way condoning the documents themselves and that it does not approve of the boycott. The House of Lords Select Committee’s report, published 14 months ago, said that negative certificates of origin were “among the most discriminatory forms of the boycott mechanism” and that by authenticating signatures on them the Foreign Office was in fact condoning them.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
